The fitting room at Tom Ford's Madison Avenue flagship runs warm

The fitting room at Tom Ford's Madison Avenue flagship runs warm. Haider Ackermann stands near the three-way mirror in shirtsleeves, one hand guiding a tailor through the drop of a trouser hem, the other sketching an invisible line along the model's calf. He does not raise his voice. The adjustment is made in French, then repeated in English for the cutter's benefit, and the room exhales. This is March 2023, six months before his first collection under the Tom Ford nameplate would show in New York, and already the rituals of the house — precision, a certain unspoken luxury, the insistence that a garment should move as though it anticipated the body — are settling into his muscle memory.

Ackermann did not arrive here by the usual route.

The Bogotá Years

Born in Bogotá to a Colombian mother and a French father, Ackermann spent his childhood between Ethiopia and Chad, following his father's work. By the time he enrolled at Antwerp's Royal Academy in the late nineties, he had lived in six countries and spoken four languages. The Academy — still riding the aftershock of the Antwerp Six — taught him construction and a kind of intellectual rigour around cloth. What it did not teach, he has said in past interviews, was commerce. That would come later, and harder.

He launched his own label in 2001. The early collections were raw, romantic in a way that felt almost reckless: draped silks, asymmetric hems, a palette that leaned into rust and charcoal and the occasional shock of crimson. The clothes found a following among editors and a narrow band of clients who wanted something other than logo-driven minimalism or the va-va-voom of early-aughts maximalism. But the business model never solidified. Ackermann worked without major backing for more than a decade, showing when he could afford to, sitting out seasons when he could not. It was a precarious arrangement, and it showed.

The Berluti Detour

In 2016, LVMH brought him to Berluti. The brief was menswear, a house known for its patinated leather shoes and a certain Parisian reserve. Ackermann's first collection there leaned into fluidity — wide trousers, unstructured blazers, a softness that read, to some, as subversive. To others it read as off-brief. The tension was never quite resolved. He left after four years, and the general consensus in the trade was that the fit had been awkward on both sides.

What he took from Berluti, though, was an education in atelier process. He learned how a last is carved, how leather ages under different treatments, the way a hand-rolled edge on a lapel can shift the entire posture of a jacket. It was technical knowledge that his own label, for all its poetry, had never required him to master. One suspects he filed it away.

The Signature

If there is a through-line in Ackermann's work — across his own label, the Berluti years, and now at Tom Ford — it is a refusal of the hard edge. His tailoring does not announce itself. A jacket might be canvassed and constructed with all the rigour of Savile Row, but the shoulder will drop half an inch lower than expected, the button stance will shift, and suddenly the garment reads as something other than armour. He has described this, in a 2019 conversation with System, as 'making space for the person'. The phrase is less precious than it sounds. What he means, one gathers, is that the clothes should not dominate.

At Tom Ford, this approach has required recalibration. The house, founded in 2005 and built on the back of Ford's own tenure at Gucci, has always traded in a specific kind of glamour: high-shine, body-conscious, unapologetically sexual. Ford himself stepped back from the creative direction in 2022, and the Estée Lauder Companies — which acquired the brand in a $2.8 billion deal that same year — needed a successor who could sustain the codes without slavishly replicating them. Ackermann's appointment, announced in March 2023, raised eyebrows. His aesthetic had always been quieter, more introspective. Could he do louche?

The First Collection

His debut for Tom Ford, shown in September 2023, answered the question obliquely. The tailoring was there — sharp, clean-lined, often in black or deep navy — but softened with draped silk blouses, trousers cut wide through the leg, a recurring motif of asymmetric necklines that recalled his own-label work. The palette stayed dark, punctuated by ivory and a single shade of burnt orange that felt, in context, almost radical. The show notes referenced 'sensuality through restraint', a phrase that could have come across as pretentious but which, on the runway, made a certain sense. The clothes did not shout. They waited.

The critical response was mixed. Some praised the maturity, the refusal to pander. Others missed the overt sexiness, the gleam. Sales figures have not been disclosed, but retail partners have indicated steady interest, particularly in the tailoring and the leather goods — an area where Ackermann's Berluti experience has proved useful. The house's signature padlock bag, introduced under Ford, has been reworked with a softer silhouette and a hand-stitched edge that takes an additional eight hours per piece. It is a small detail, invisible to most, but it signals intent.

What Comes Next

Ackermann is not a designer prone to grand statements. In the few interviews he has given since joining Tom Ford, he has spoken more about process than vision, more about the atelier than the archive. He is fifty-two, old enough to have seen several cycles of hype and backlash, and he seems uninterested in either. What he appears to want — and whether the market will allow it remains an open question — is to build quietly, to let the work accumulate over seasons rather than detonating with each show.

The challenge, of course, is that Tom Ford is not a niche label. It is a global brand with ambitious growth targets, a fragrance empire, and a clientele that expects a certain level of theatre. Ackermann's temperament is not theatrical. Whether that constitutes a problem or a provocation depends, in the end, on how one defines luxury now. If it is about noise and newness and the constant churn of product, then his tenure may prove too subtle. If it is about facture, about the space between the body and the cloth, about garments that improve with wear rather than with Instagram — then perhaps he is exactly where he needs to be.

The fitting room is still warm. The hem is pinned. Ackermann steps back, nods once, and the model is released. Another jacket is brought forward. The work continues.